Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Right.”

He put his left hand on the ledge of wood, then instructed his cortical node to disengage the nerves of his left arm. From the elbow down he could feel nothing, not even the dead meat coldness of anaesthetic, the buoyant release of morphine. His forearm and hand had ceased to exist.

“OK,” he said, finding out just how much it’d cost Gabriel to say that.

Gabriel pushed the handkerchief into his mouth. It was disgusting. Soggy, tasting of sour acidic stomach juices. Good. Focus on the revulsion, Shutting out the sight of Gabriel steadying herself on the second step. Knuckles whitening as she clenched the makeshift club. Her face mimicking the intense concentration he’d once seen on a golf pro’s face as he lined up his putter for an albatross.

Greg heard the swish of air.

Shock was worse than pain in its own way. His brain seemed to expand time, letting him see the full horror of his flesh being triturated, every detail slamming into his mind. The sight flushing away the intention to pull with all his strength. It took the animal fear of impending death to twist his mind back, overriding reluctance. Greg pulled.

He felt the scream rising inside him as he watched his ruined hand squeezing through a metal circle that was two centimetres too small. It was obscenely malleable, damp cracking sounds marking its progress.

His hand came free, and a lungful of air blasted the handkerchief from his mouth. There was nothing to stop the scream that would vent some of his anguish. He hovered on the brink for one eternal second. Closed his gaping mouth, contracting the throat muscles that would’ve formed the blissful release of sound.

Gabriel: laughing, crying, whimpering. “We’ve done it.” Wiping tears from her face. “We’ve fucking done it.”

Greg drank down litres of fresh clean air. His right hand was still on the other side of the railing. He turned it slowly and brought it and the cuff through the gap. His left hand was something from a butcher’s stall, crushed, swelling with blood, pussy fluid leaking from the graze where the club had struck.

Greg shared a long glance with Gabriel, a love that wasn’t physical, didn’t need to be. They were blood siblings, a far stronger bond. “Time to go,” he said. It broke the spell.

She went to work on the store room’s central biolum panel, easing it away from its clips. He started on the Harrods hampers and found a case of three-star brandy.

He clamped the first bottle between his knees, and unscrewed the cap with his right hand. The aroma set up a satanic craving in his maltreated stomach.

After opening five bottles, Greg tiptoed around the room, soaking the kelpboard cases with the liquor. Taking care not to spill any on the floor with its wide cracks.

“The window’s behind this lot,” Gabriel whispered, poking a tall stack of cases. “It’ll take an age to shift them.”

“Forget shifting them. Our exit isn’t going to be stealthy. You got the biolum?”

“Yeah.” She’d cracked the back open, exposing the activation trigger. A finger-sized pewter cylinder with enough charge to activate the motes’ bias. There was also enough charge to spark-two, maybe three times if their luck was in.

He impaled a wad of paper on the screws of Gabriel’s club, sloshing brandy over it. She put it on the desk, eagerness animating her features, dulling the pain.

He put his shoulders to the stack of crates, tensing. Nodded.

Two idiot smiles.

A minute blue spark sizzled between the cylinder electrodes and one of the screws. The paper caught at once, a bright yellow tongue of flame that left sharp purple after-images on his retinas.

Gabriel picked up her torch and thrust it against some of the cases he’d doused. Flames bloomed wherever it touched. She carried it round in a triumphal circuit.

The room was becoming dazzlingly bright to Greg’s gloaming-acclimatized eyes; but he waited until the fire began to crackle noisily before heaving at the cases. The stack toppled with a crash which seemed deafeningly loud in the small room. Cases burst open, scattering tins of meat with Brazilian labels across the oak floorboards.

Greg jumped on to the two remaining cases below the window, kicking out the glass. It shattered into wicked ice daggers, scything off into the galactic-deep night outside.

“Out,” he yelled, and used his good hand to haul Gabriel up on to the cases. She balanced on the narrow dirt-ingrained windowledge, crouching down for the jump. There were shouts coming from the basement. The fire had really taken hold now. Greg could feel its heat on his face and his right hand,

Gabriel had already gone. And someone was pounding up the stairs. Greg flexed his knees and leapt into the cool damp air.

Processor Node One Status: Loading Basic Management Program.

Julia’s head jerked up. She hadn’t actually been sleeping, just allowing her rattled, abused thoughts some peace.

Processor Node Two Status: Loading Basic Management Program.

“What?” asked Walshaw.

Memory Node One: File Codes Loaded.

The huge black man, Teddy, was giving her that eagle-eyed stare again, as if he was examining her soul. Finding it flawed.

Memory Node Two: File Codes Loaded.

“Lord Jesus,” she clapped her hands in excited delight. “He’s done it. Royan. He’s in the ‘ware.”

Memory Node Three: File Codes Loaded.

The fabric of the nodes’ artificial mentality rose out of nowhere to fortify and enrich her own thoughts. Dictionaries, language and technical lexicons, encyclopedias, logic matrices, all returned to their warm familiar places.

Neural Augmentation On Line.

Walshaw was leaning over his terminal, hands reaching for the keyboard. The cubes were full of crazed graphics, slowly returning to equilibrium.

Hello, Juliet.

“Grandpa!”

Her view of the study was suddenly riddled with cracks, it fragmented and whirled away. She was looking down on Earth from a great height. But the picture was wrong, there were no half-shades, the colours were all primary; an amorphous Jigsaw of emerald, crimson, turquoise, and rose-gold oil patterns, It was overlaid by regular grid lines. False-Colour Thematic Image, supplied the nodes. There was a town at the centre of the image, one which was curiously blurred around its outskirts.

Wisbech, Julia said, intuitively. There was no sound to hear, no tactile sensation present in this flat universe which had captured her, only the image itself. She could sense her grandfather’s presence by her side, They weren’t alone.

Juliet, I’d like you to meet a very smart young lad. Goes by the name of Royan.

Pleased to meet you, Miss Juliet. I’ve never met an heiress before.

Thank you for unlocking my grandpa, Royan.

It was a breeze; whoever wrote the virus was dumb.

It didn’t seem that way when I was on the receiving end.

I’m not surprised. You know, you ought to load some proper protection into your nodes. They’re terrific pieces of gear, wish I had some. But the guardian bytes you’re using leave them wide open.

I used to think I had proper protection.

I could write you some. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you, you’re a friend of Greg’s. And the PSP hates you. That makes you an A-one person in my book.

I’d take him up on that, Juliet, if I were you. Royan and I have been having a long chat. Boy knows what he’s talking about.

Long? she asked.

You’re operating in ‘ware time now, Miss Juliet. Fast fast fast.

Oh. Thanks for the offer, Royan. But I think we’d better do what we can for Greg first.

Yeah, said Philip. Misjudged him in a big way. Jumping the gun. Never would’ve done that in the flesh. Really shouldn’t have done it now. But we can make amends soon enough.